What matters to you in your market?

The word ‘insight’ gets banded around a lot in business-based conversations and in many cases, it’s easy to use without a strong grasp of what it actually means for your organisation.

Gaining a market insight is to have thorough understanding of your customers and how they react to your business. But markets are often complex and change over time, plus the data and information about a market can be almost endless. Information gathering can be a very costly exercise and how much knowledge you can actually gain varies from case to case.

There are a few ways you can choose to acquire relevant market data:

primary market research

secondary data analysis of publicly available information

through your team (particularly your customer-facing team).

Data is data. The data about the market that firms acquire can become knowledge – and knowledge that is uniquely valuable to the company is true insight.

How do you gain an insight to improve your offering?

Many organisations have a market research arm or a competitive intelligence function, but reaching a true market insight requires a systematic approach. The optimal process needs to be embedded in the organisation to constantly scan the environment they are in. If done well, this feeds the development of great marketing strategy.

We can divide the market landscape into two categories: the broader market context and the immediate market context. In the broader market context, we may be interested in political policies, economic factors, sociological changes or technological advances. PEST analysis helps us structure this information and determine its relevance to our business. These factors impact on our market context over time and in turn can impact the business.

In the immediate market context, we’re more concerned about our customers, competition, suppliers and channels to market. These are the key elements the business is immersed in every day. We can ask questions such as:

“what do our customers need?”

“who are our key competitors?”

“where are they strong?”

Considering each of these in turn to gather valuable market insights is critical in making wise decisions about our marketing strategy and, ultimately, how to allocate limited resources to mitigate risks and drive growth.

The saying goes “garbage in = garbage out” when it comes to strategic planning. It’s time to gain some true insights in your target market to ensure you have the right foundations for winning strategy. These insights may simply be sitting in the minds of your team or your might have to go out afraid get them.